What motivates editors?

“Engaging with the Press: A Guide for Perplexed Readers and Sources” was written by Dick Tofel for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication. It was inspired and informed by Dick’s Center for Health Communication class “Engaging with the Press: A Practical Look at Health Communication.”

Reporters do not generally assign their own stories; that is most often the province of editors, who will usually be invisible to sources. Because editors are usually the initiators of what gets covered, and shape how stories appear, it is critical to understand their motivations as well. Again, they are as varied as the human beings who occupy these roles, but a few common factors are often at play.

Competition

Once upon a time, before the secular (as opposed to cyclical) business crisis of the press that began about 2005, competition—the need to get stories, or elements of them, before other news outlets—drove much of journalism. As the business crisis has intensified, this is true in fewer precincts of the press. It remains a driver in national news, including of politics and entertainment, as well as in business news. But in much of local news, and even in some subject matter “verticals” focused on a particular subject or industry, competition is less of a factor because there is simply less of it—fewer outlets, fewer beats with multiple reporters, less pressure to report quickly or even completely.

Timeliness and scale

Notwithstanding a lessening of competition in many places and niches, timeliness remains a principal driver of news reporting. As a reader, you have been conditioned to expect this: news is novel, or should be to you, unless you were personally involved in it, in which case you will have been aware of it before you read the “news.” As a source, of course, that will be reversed: if you have been consulted before the news is published, by definition it must not be entirely news to you.

But the novelty of news is deemed by editors to be a primary factor in what attracts consumers: surprise. The greater the surprise, generally, the bigger the news. (Bob Woodward of the Washington Post once famously defined the most important stories as those which caused a reader to exclaim, “Holy Shit!”) This is where timeliness comes in: the more timely the report, the greater the chance of surprise; that is, other sources will not have already delivered the same news. To the extent you are seeking attention for some development, you enhance your chances if you can cast it as a surprise. Conversely, one technique which can be effective in limiting coverage is to convince the reporter that the “news” isn’t really new.

The novelty of news is deemed by editors to be a primary factor in what attracts consumers: surprise. The greater the surprise, generally, the bigger the news.

At a high level, the second factor in determining the relative importance of news, beyond surprise, might be termed scale: how widespread editors deem its impact to be. Thus, for instance, the unexpected death of a little-known person is surely news, but the unexpected death of a celebrity, known and of interest to many people, is news on a larger scale. Incremental news about treatments for diseases which occur widely will tend to be deemed “bigger” even than developments which are of larger magnitude with respect to diseases which are rare.

Brief philosophical digression: news has a very interesting relationship to history. I write a newsletter about journalism called “Second Rough Draft.” The name is a reference to a set of quotations referring, more or less, to news as the “first rough draft of history.”

Much news reporting is structured as such a “first draft,” and readers of history will be familiar with how historical writing about the last two centuries—that is since the creation of what we know as journalism—tends to draw heavily on contemporary news accounts, at least for insights into how events were widely perceived at the time they were occurring. One of the reasons I find that history can be so fascinating is that access to a wider range of sources than journalists may have enjoyed at the time often reveals how flawed or limited those contemporary perceptions may have been. Journalists, for instance, cannot usually read the diaries of public people; historians often can.

Beyond this, perhaps the greatest insight of my journalistic hero Barney Kilgore may have been that many people, in many circumstances, are actually looking to the news of yesterday for insights into what is going to happen tomorrow. The two best examples of Kilgore’s approach can be found in the lead stories of his Journal published after two momentous events, Pearl Harbor and John Kennedy’s assassination. On December 8, 1941, the Journal’s headline story began not with an account of events in Hawaii, but with this: “War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.” On Monday, November 25, 1963, the lead Journal story was not about the weekend’s events in Dallas but instead began this way: “The Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson will be vastly different in style and method of operation from that of the late President John F. Kennedy. But it will be surprisingly similar in basic direction.”

This leaning forward is the essence of business journalism (“what should I buy or sell today?”), but it is a motivation for both editors and readers that extends well beyond business (e.g. “who seems likely to win this election and what difference will it make?,” “when will the pandemic be truly over?”). News and history thus become more than a continuum; to a meaningful degree, they interact with one another, and become iterative.

Mission

In considering the motivations of editors who choose which stories to cover, you don’t want to overlook what a publication considers to be its mission. Here it will be useful, although not entirely dispositive, to distinguish between for-profit and nonprofit news organizations, as outlined in greater detail below.

However, there has historically been a significant tension between how editors think about the mission of their publication and how their business bosses view the same issue. The mission of the New York Times Co., for instance, is legally mandated as maximizing shareholder value over the long run, but Times editors invariably resonate more to the mottoes of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and doing so “without fear or favor.” A similar impetus prevails in almost all newsrooms, although greater sympathy has arisen for business goals in recent decades, especially in places where the business crisis has become existential. Just as Samuel Johnson said the prospect of hanging “concentrates the mind wonderfully,” so with the prospect of layoffs.

Craft

It is possible, and useful, to make another distinction between kinds of news organizations, the literary vs. the practical. In practice, this is more a continuum than a binary, but, especially today, there are relatively few outlets that put a premium on the literary qualities of their prose, while the majority are simply trying to convey material clearly. The principal upshot of undertaking a literary approach comes in the painstaking effort to locate the powerful anecdote or the perfectly illustrative human subject—as well as the willingness to take the time to do so. Literary journalism simply costs more to produce.

It becomes worthwhile to think about what you are wearing when dealing with a reporter, your manner of speech, what any office or home the reporter sees looks like, what happens before, after, or during breaks in your formal conversation—and what all of that says to an observer.

For sources, it will be important to understand where an outlet (and a writer) is positioned on this continuum, primarily as a means of determining the depth with which they are likely to explore the characters who populate their reporting. Should you find yourself or someone you represent becoming such a “character,” you will want to take special care in the details you convey, both consciously and perhaps unconsciously (in terms of your surroundings, behavior, and activities), so as to shape the portrait along favorable lines. In this unusual circumstance, for instance, it becomes worthwhile to think about what you are wearing when dealing with a reporter, your manner of speech, what any office or home the reporter sees looks like, what happens before, after, or during breaks in your formal conversation—and what all of that says to an observer.

Space and time

In the days of print newspapers and magazines, the limited physical size of the products (the “news hole”) was a hugely significant factor in the articles that were produced. It was common (and remains so to the extent these periodicals persist) for editors to order up a fixed number of words on a particular subject. This, in turn, drove the depth into which an article could get on a subject, and the appetite of the assigned reporter for shorter or longer quotes—or no quotes at all.

In the world of digital publishing, the length of stories is not nearly as tightly prescribed—the art of “fitting to space” is much less of a factor. On the other hand, editors now have much more information than they once did on what readers actually consume, and one big thing they have learned for a fact is how few readers read stories to completion and how short (and continuing to shorten) reader attention spans actually are. Along with reporter productivity pressures in an industry under duress, the net effect is that while online stories could run longer, they increasingly do not. Longer, narrative-driven works are an exception; the same analytic tools indicate that for the rare piece that is especially well-crafted, longform journalism is very much alive and well.

The implication for sources is that reporters, much of the time, will appear to be in a hurry, and often impatient with overlong explanations or digressions. It is important to get to your point as promptly as possible, and to answer questions directly and succinctly if feasible.

It is important to get to your point as promptly as possible, and to answer questions directly and succinctly if feasible.

On broadcast radio and television, the tyranny of the clock, a different sort of fixed “news hole,” remains very much in place. In most cases, this means that “soundbites” are the order of the day when you are being interviewed. As with so many other aspects of engaging with the press, some familiarity with how a particular broadcast tends to work will be useful in tailoring the length of responses to questions. Some podcasts (and a very few interview shows) will be exceptions, offering the audio analogue to longform print in welcoming more discursive answers and a truer sense of conversation.

Cost

It would be naïve, especially as the business crisis of the press grinds on, for us not to recognize that the cost of doing a particular story is one of the considerations in the minds of an editor. At the extreme—for instance, in war zones where the expense of security for reporters can be enormous—even the wealthiest publishers find their work constrained in this manner.

On a more workaday basis, some types of reporting are, by their nature, simply more expensive than others. Investigative reporting is especially costly, for two reasons: first, not all stories that are begun yield publishable results; this is the cost of “dry holes,” analogous to oil drilling. Next is that it’s often hard to predict how long investigative reporting will take, or what scope it will assume. In a genuine investigation, you simply do not know where the facts you learn will lead you.

The investigation of apparent euthanasia at a hospital in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina conducted by reporter Sheri Fink was initially published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. It was honored with ProPublica’s first Pulitzer Prize. It took literally years of work, first by Fink but then also by her editors, and we publicly estimated that it had cost ProPublica and the Times more than $400,000 (in 2009 dollars) to execute. Multi-reporter projects of significant duration can cost even more.

If readers find that stories are growing shorter and less detailed, shorter reader attention spans are one factor, but cost may well be another.

At the other end of the spectrum, deadline reporting of announcements, and science stories that simply report a new research result, to take two examples, are predictably limited in time and in the effort required; costs, at least on a per-story basis, are relatively low.

To the extent that higher cost stories yield greater readership, or garner prizes or otherwise build a news brand, editors may be willing to pay. But the greater the pressure on budgets, the stronger the impulse to concentrate efforts on lower cost means of generating content. If sources find that reporters are in a hurry, even on matters that do not involve breaking news, this is often one explanation; they are under pressure to get to the next story. If readers find that stories are growing shorter and less detailed, shorter reader attention spans are one factor, but cost may well be another.

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